Reports of the Death of the Humanities are Greatly Exaggerated... You'll Know Them When You See Them

The public humanities look like young people describing their lives, their hopes, their fears, their visions in the shape of poems on a stage in front of mostly strangers. The humanities were in the poems and the performances, but they were also inherent in the choice young people and their families made to gather together, to see, to hear, and to be heard.

The public humanities look like recent gatherings in Urbana-Champaign.

An Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice Activation event on September 19th, created in partnership with FirstFollowers, was designed to make space for individuals serving, and being impacted by, long-term sentences to explore ideas about how to create justice. When artist and organizer Renaldo Hudson shared the impact of the carceral system on his life he asked the 70+ people gathered in the room to remember, “We are so much more than they want us to think we are.”

You’ll know the public humanities when you see these things.

• The public humanities create a public – it’s a gathering people choose to come to – and the people who gather may not already know each other.
• People are being talked with, not talked at. People are learning “with,” not just learning “from.”
• The public humanities ask people to employ capacities we inherently hold as humans – being curious, listening closely, changing our minds, embracing complexity and nuance. The public humanities call upon us to use, practice, and develop ways of engaging with one another that help us discern our own beliefs, expand our understanding of what is possible, and appreciate that differences make us stronger. These particularly human abilities are like any other skill: they get better with practice and, when underdeveloped or unattended to, become rough.

Ultimately, the public humanities is what happens when we can come together to have the conversations we want to have but don’t quite know how to have. And the humanities are happening all around us in Illinois. When our new website launches next month(!) you’ll find a map on the home page showcasing organizations that are making the humanities happen in nearly every county, every month.

We cannot have the public humanities on our own; we can only have it together. We thank you for being part of the community that knows the public humanities when you see it – and for supporting the humanities to make Illinois more just, livable, and connected.